On Friday, July 31, 2026, Lieutenant Commander James M. Ennes, Jr., U.S. Navy, ret., slipped his cable and unfurled his sails. With the Great Pilot at the helm, he set a course to his final home port.
On July 17, an Iranian missile strike killed three U.S. servicemembers at the Muwaffaq Salti Air Base in Jordan, a stark reminder of the cost of President Donald Trump’s war of choice in the Middle East. Their deaths were avoidable, just as the strategy that put them in harm’s way was and remains reversible. Such forward deployments are always a “safe” option until missiles and drones rain down, highlighting the importance of withdrawing American troops from the region and ending this disastrous war.
The Navy has been through a lot over the past several months.
Chief of Naval Operations ADM Daryl Caudle recently put a stark number on the submarine problem. The United States is delivering submarines at a rate of about 1.2 per year when the minimum requirement is at least 2.3. As he told the Submarine Industrial Base Council in March, the Navy does not deploy “tons of submarine.” It deploys complete units of combat power.[1]
The debate over U.S. autonomous weapons policy is dominated by concerns over moving too fast. Detractors warn that we may risk losing control of the systems themselves or the escalation dynamics they will impact. But, as we argue in a recent report, the reality is that the Pentagon is moving too slow owing to funding, procurement, organizational, and oversight systems that are poorly suited to fielding and continuously updating the most decisive capability on the modern battlefield. While increasingly autonomous systems are not preferable in an ideal world, they are being developed in the real one. If the U.S. neglects to develop them proactively, it risks having to develop them reactively in a crisis, with far less time to conform with our ethical standards.
Most Americans seldom hear the term “amphibious operations” outside of an entertainment context: John Wayne as Sgt. John Stryker in The Sands of Iwo Jima or Tom Hanks as Capt. John Miller in the opening scenes of Saving Private Ryan. For service members, though, it’s a different story.
Like the weather, everyone complains about Pentagon spending and mismanagement, but no one does anything about it. Leaders of the world’s most expensive military have refused to conduct or failed to complete every internal financial audit since Congress first demanded such accountability in the 1990s. The Department of Defense owns over 70% of the nation’s assets and can’t account for half of them. In fairness, military brass has had plenty of enablers in its failures to tame wild and sometimes blindfolded spending, with a special boost from political leaders who consistently block reform.
